The UK government's civil service reform plan says a lot about using data more effectively. This is great news. For those of us who work in public service transformation across Europe this reawakening has been some time coming, but we now see administrations across Europe racing to embrace open data and harnessing it to deliver real and rapid value to taxpayers.

Earlier this year, we surveyed senior civil servants and public officials in government departments and agencies about their attitudes towards the future of public administration. The results reveal that open data was one of the top issues facing European public sector leaders, alongside developing citizen-centric services, collaboration between private and public organisations and citizens, and developing shared services.

Where administrators have been successful in transformation, they have exploited open public data to drive innovation. The German open data website, for instance, hosted a contest for new applications. The contest was open to everyone, even outside Germany. The only limitation: the application must use openly licensed data from German authorities. A total of 320 government data sets were released for this competition, some 112 ideas for re-use of data were handed in and 77 applications were created.

Even within a complex administrative environment that reconciles three languages with federal and regional government, Belgium has seen a rapid increase in open data initiatives. Slow to get going, Belgium has now begun to prime innovators with open-government data. The Belgian federal government has launched two portals for open data. The first was created by the administrative simplification agency andprovides information for public services, enterprises and citizens about the EU directive on re-use of public sector information, as well as access to about 200 datasets. The second provides information for developers and ICT companies and gives access to about 80 datasets.

The Spanish government has a portal for organising public information about state administration and also provides general information, training materials and news about the reuse of public sector information.

While it has been an early mover in open data, the UK government would be wise to take a good look around. Others are catching up fast. The Cabinet Office wants to realise a world where "digital by default needs to become a reality". A worthy aim, but let's push on with opening up government data and allow digital innovation to flourish in our public services.